I've had MacBooks since 2005, and I'm an amateur photographer. I really don't miss the ports or MagSafe at all. I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap. I've found that the cord being on other side is nearly as good as magsafe anyway, as it will be better positioned to pull out if it gets yanked.

Yes, I did use the SD card reader from time to time, but most serious cameras use other cards (my older camera uses compact flash, and the newer one uses XQD). It makes no sense for Apple to integrate readers for those, and my XQD/CF readers also read SD cards, so the card reader is useless.

All of my mobile peripherals at this point are USB-C, so I don't care about USB-A ports either. And when I'm at home, I use a dock, which has all of the ports I need.

Honestly I'd much rather that they keep the laptops thin instead of adding ports I'm not going to use.

> and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap

Man, my 2017 MacBook Pro's USB-C charging cable (the official one, not third party, and in pristine condition) constantly disconnects itself to the point where I'm basically traumatized from the annoyance of it now. It only provides power if it's ALL the way in, and the damned thing just pushes itself out half a millimeter and cuts power repeatedly.

I really want to like the generic nature of USB-C charging, but proper magsafe with a strong magnet is just miles better (third party magnet adapters for USB-C both break the spec and also tend to have very weak magnets which can cause damage from sparking at the port).

Man, that half a millimetre difference between connected and disconnected drove me nuts. It is absolutely infuriating because there is zero physical feedback when you try to connect the cable.

I don't have anything helpful to offer but I feel your pain. Reading your comment almost brings on PTSD from remembering what it was like.

I actually restored my 2015 Macbook Pro and have been so happy and content using that in the past two years or so. Not sure about the other sizes, but my 13" from 2015 does everything better than the one from 2017. Performance, keyboard, connectors. None of the overheating bullshit where the fan is constantly going and performance is throttled.

I had similar problem with MagSafe; the culprit was the dust that both the charger and the laptop collected over the years. After some compressed air treatment, it was as good as new.

Everything is pristine. There's no dust. It happens anyway.

FWIW, I was very unsatisfied with my 2016 MBP USB-C ports and found them very unreliable, but am quite content with the ports on the mid 2019 MBP and the 2020 MBA (M1). So, maybe they've improved over time.

I have a 2017 for testing at work. It has never moved. I ssh into it for some macos specific testing. I have plugged and unplugged the charger maybe 5 times.

Yesterday I moved it around. And noticed what you described. The plug will come back out by a millimeter. And then it won't charge.

Maybe just a bad design of the usb-c port then.

How about cleaning the connector?

There's nothing to clean. Everything is pristine. The problem has even persisted across replacement cables and a full top case replacement (the keyboard, of course) where Apple scrubs the whole thing down before they give it back. Maybe I should superstitiously blow on it like it's an NES cartridge. It won't help, but maybe I'll feel like I have some agency.

You sure your power brick is fine? Mine randomly disconnected until I got a replacement. No problems now.

The problem is the laptop connection, not the brick connection.

Maybe bend the male usb out some.

Haha yikes. I'm not saying that your idea wouldn't work, but I'm definitely not going to do it. :)

Yes, but how about the _inside_ of the USB-C port? Sounds like the inside to me

> Sounds like the inside to me

Yeah, well, it's not.

> Yes, but how about the _inside_ of the USB-C port?

It's pristine, like I said elsewhere already.

I had a 2017 MBP with the same issue. Replacing the ports was the fix.

USB-C would have been a great replacement... for DisplayPort/Thunderbolt ports.

It's finally, years later, getting merely not infuriating to be stuck with only USB-C ports.

Single port for display + charging is very nice, when it works.

That iPhones and most iPads still don't use it is annoying. Having two kinds of charging cable around, years after Apple went all-in on USB-C for laptops, sucks.

[EDIT] two kinds of charging cable and still needing to buy & carry two kinds of adapters/dongles for everything. Ugh.

Apple uses lightning on their wireless keyboards and mice for chargring... I mean, what the fuck! They even came with lightning to USB-A cables, which won't plug into any USB-C Mac. Also it didn't come with a power brick presumably "to save the environment." I literally had no way to charge them. Totally asinine.

I am pretty sure they come with Lightning to USB-C now. At least the ones included with the new iMac do, and iPhones do so it would make sense for them all to.

I agree about iPhone and non-pro iPads. They should 100% be on USB-C at this point.

Suspect at this point Apple doesn’t want to break compatibility with their Lightning ecosystem when wireless charging is probably going to be the future on iPhones.

The most recent non-pro iPad does have USB-C and I expect whenever they get around to redesigning the lowest cost iPads they’ll also move to USB-C.

My impression from these reports is that Apple is planning to differentiate their laptops more strongly than they have been: there will be ones that place "thin and light" as a priority, and ones that place "give me more I/O, dammit" as a priority. If you want a high-performing Mac laptop that's thin and light and you don't care abort ports (hi, this is me), you can already get an M1 Air that has the same performance as the M1 MBP (and this is exactly what I did). The M1 Air is good enough that you're not really losing anything other than the perceived cachet of putting "Pro" on the nameplate. (Well, you are also losing the Touch Bar, but one can argue that's actually a net gain.)

From these reports, the next revision to the Air is going to get a bit of a redesign, colors, faster CPU, etc., but "Air" is still almost certainly going to mean the line that prioritizes being thin and light. You will still have a Mac laptop that gives you what you want. But people who do want more ports will, for the first time since Mac laptops went USB-C, also get what they want. (Or at least get closer to it.)

As a musician with tons of peripherals, some of which are annoyingly sensitive and can't be used through hubs or anything but straight-through adapters (my turntable mixer's digital interface, for example), I welcome the return of the ports. Its not uncommon to have an audio interface, one or more midi controllers, the aforementioned mixer all connected for instance. And basically all of those things still use USB-B ports for whatever reason, and I never see USB-B to C cables ever.

Search "USB-C Printer Cable" and you'll find a number of results, i.e.: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=33457

Apple no longer cares about providing computers to niche users like musicians.

> and I never see USB-B to C cables ever

Have you heard of these obscure websites called Amazon or eBay.

They have tens of thousands of cables in every configuration you need.

The last time I searched amazon for usb-b to usb-c cables I genuinely couldn't find any. I bet I would have better luck searching for 'usb-c printer cable' as someone else pointed out, but I didn't think of that.

Last time I needed a cable on short notice before a gig I had to settle for an adapter, and was really lucky that it worked. I've had other seemingly simple pin-to-pin adapters not work on me before.

Next time I'm in a jam I'll run down to my local ebay though, thank you for this super helpful reply.

Just bought an USB-C to USB-B cable for my Macbook Air m1 and an iConnectivity midi interface and it didn't work. (Brand was Equip). Another cable from Delock to mini USB-A was fine though. Some of these cables seem to be only for charging so do some research. Best bet seems to be Apple adapter even tough I had them break every year or so.

It is very difficult to find some cables and adapters on amazon due to the bias towarda the most popular kinda of cables.

Each to their own but magsafe saves my laptop frequently, it’s nice to not have to worry about it being yanked off a table. I have a ton of usb a stuff that doesnt have a usb c counterpart, and likely never will. I tried to use a USB drive to move stuff between two computers and we ran into a “one is usb a only one is USB c only” problem

The vast majority of cameras, even professional mirrorless or DSLRs, currently use SD cards now. Perhaps that's changing, but I would imagine there's sufficient utility to the SD card reader that many users would value that feature.

That's not true for professional mirrorless/DSLRs, which on the high end often use other cards like CFast, XQD, or CF. And as mentioned, many readers for those cards also integrate SD readers.

The vast majority of people these days just use their phones for cameras, and don't use point-and-shoots or other things with full-size SD cards.

So really SD cards cater to just the mid-range camera market, where people use mirrorless/DSLRs but not high-end versions that often use faster cards.

I don't think it's a good idea for Apple to make everyone's laptops bulkier so a small minority of people can avoid using a $17 adapter like this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NW8RPYN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

For a company that prunes as ruthlessly as Apple seems to, including an SD slot in this day and age seems like an odd choice. I'm even a photographer and I rarely use the SD card slot on my MacBook Pro and certainly wouldn't consider tossing a small/cheap adapter into my travel electronics kit a big deal.

As someone else mentioned many of the higher end new cameras are moving XQD or something similar that is faster I presume to deal with video.

With that said, I have cameras that use SD cards and don't see the need for an SD port. I have usbc adapters that are not much bigger than the SD card that I can use on my MBA or iPad. With LR, I can basically load my days pics on either device and have them available everywhere.

I'm very skeptical they are adding back SD, so we'll see. I think MagSafe is going to be something like what came to the latest iPhone and not what people think of traditional MagSafe. Or maybe they'll add something to the usbc port that works like MagSafe if using an Apple cable.

> I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap.

I felt the same until my cat pulled my laptop off my desk by the cord. It landed on the corner with the USB plugged in, destroying the port on the laptop itself. Probably knocked a few hundred off the resale value. The little shit.

Apple’s goal is to have every portable computer work like an iPhone: you charge it overnight, then unplug it and use it unwired for a full day. This is why the charging port on the mouse is on the bottom, for instance.

They never quite got their Intel laptops there, though. (Especially running MS Teams, Slack, and Chrome!)

It’s kind of funny that, now that they can make a laptop that really does last all day on one charge (according to tests of M1), they’re switching back to MagSafe.

Unfortunately that doesn't work for those of us that need to run compute intensive tasks, like browsing the web, or compiling stuff, or running docker.

There's this stupid dream that the computer needs to be light and fanless and thin and sexy. It doesn't need to do that. I'm happy if it doesn't melt while trying to run some software I need to do my job.

> compute intensive tasks, like browsing the web

Modern computing is a sad place :(

My experience with my mpb M1 16GB is that it barely every spins up the fans, even when pegging 2 cores to 100% because web.whatsapp is doing it's thing again and I have a Python process doing some hammering. Docker in silent model is just consuming RAM but not really consuming battery. The only thing i've noticed that is really heavy is jitsi. But Discord or Teams are pretty chill on the battery life to my experience

One thing Lenovo gets right is that they have fairly clear desktop replacement and travel laptop personas. I'm pretty clearly in the latter category although I'm hoping that the new rumored 14" will be able to replace both my 2015 MacBook Pro and iMac.

> run compute intensive tasks, like browsing the web

lol, it's not only browsing though but web-infested Electron apps as well. Used draw.io (which is otherwise a fine diagramming app) the other day, with fans spinning up all the time. It's sad to see that draw.io was (and internally largely remains) originally a Java (Swing) app, seemingly only ported to a fscking browser frontend as a fashion statement when the exact same things it does I could do almost 20 years ago on a PowerBook using OmniGraffle.

I can comfortably work all day on battery doing all of those tasks on my M1. I can work all day at a coffee shop and leave my charger at home.

> They never quite got their Intel laptops there, though.

Man is that an understatement. My work MBP - a 16" i9 - may as well be a desktop.

A desktop would probably be quieter than my 16”, which ramps up the fans at even a whiff of CPU usage.

Always a fun game of “which browser tab is burning my lap?”

I bet that's true for most laptops regardless of whether it's got the battery life or not.

Maybe the difference is that I'm not often using the laptop with the cord strung out around animals (not that there is anything wrong with doing that). For me, at home where I have a dog and several small children, the laptop is usually on the dock. The same is true at work. When on the go, I don't usually have the dog/small children.

Magsafe saved my laptop from a dog who heard thunder just last week.

XQD has never caught on and there hasn't been a camera released that uses them since 2018

Whats up with photo/video people gatekeeping “serious” vs functional

Your point might have some merit but SD will hold out for the next 5-8 years that purchasers of this machine will expect

Regardless of the potential merits of alternative storage formats, it's a good point that people who have needed an SD card reader since their removal have probably gone out and bought external ones by now. I'd expect the standalone units to generally be higher-quality than the ones that would be built in.

That said, I'm glad to see Apple has finally realized some of the ways they've been alienating their customer base, and they appear to be walking back some of their most unpopular changes.

Apple has sold their dual GPU late 2015 powerhouse model on the website, allowing people to completely skip the USBC donglebook with butterfly keyboards and touch bar

I’m looking forward to having that in the new processor and with touchbar

They are acknowledging the folly of their ways as they have gotten rid of the butterfly keyboard, adding magsafe back, and adding sd cards back

They are making the least contentious and perfect machine

> They are making the least contentious and perfect machine

My "perfect machine" could also play DVDs, but that may be getting a bit contentious.

I mentioned what I use, not what everyone uses (Nikon D850, XQD card). True, XQD has mostly been replaced by CFExpress.

Regardless, the point remains that high-end cameras often use high-end memory cards that are not SD cards.

For what it’s worth, XQD has been succeeded by CFExpress which is why you don’t see new devices using XQD.

There’s SD cards for 99% of all hardware, and then there’s a ton of different standards for all these niches. Like CompactFlash, XQD is a dead format already. Apple isn’t going to add ports for that.

> Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Touch Bar onto users

For what it's worth, once I got the physical escape key back, I've come to really like the Touch Bar.

Is Apple even going to refresh any of its Mac products with Intel CPUs at this point?

When they first announced the transition last year, it was implied that some products will still get refreshed during the 2-year transition period. But based on this article and common sense, there is minimal incentive to do an Intel refresh. Refreshing both discourages buying of Apple silicon-powered Macs and lessens the performance jump that Apple is so eager to publicize.

For example, Tiger Lake H-series was just announced/released and it'd logically target the Macbook Pro 16.

I'd be a little surprised if Apple release _any_ new Intel machine. I'd be _amazed_ if they release an Intel laptop. It would be generally slower than the 13" M1 (Anandtech has Tiger Lake H _just_ beating the M1 in for multithreaded workloads in short synthetic tests, but given the throttling shown (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performanc...) even in a presumably friendly reference laptop it wouldn't be competitive in the real world) and have far worse battery life, and be replaced in under a year; what would be the point?

They refreshed the iMac with new Intel processors two months after the Apple Silicon transition was announced, I think that is what they were referring to. I doubt any other computers will get new Intel processors at this point.

Large integrators like Apple usually have a tie line to inside Intel (in this case, probably at the CEO/VP levels) that would feed information to Apple regarding product lines.

Yes, Tiger Lake H-series was just announced, but it's likely Intel proposed selling this chip to Apple 2.5 years ago, and Apple didn't like the roadmap, and said No Thanks.

That's how much time supply chain changes like the move to apple silicon chip will need - I wouldn't be surprised if Apple already knew of all of Intel's roadmaps 5 years into the future, and decided, nope. No thanks. Not giving any more money to Intel.

From this point of view, you can tell, it's detrimental to Apple to go back to Intel now, if they wanted to use the Tiger Lake H they would have used the threat of M1 as a bargaining chip to lower the pricing on upcoming chips. It's obvious they didn't do that.

After using M1 for some time I don't really want any Intel machine any more.

Perhaps the Intel Mac Pro?

I'm pretty sure they're done with the touch bar

Are there any rumors about that?

That's the only change that my next laptop isn't a ThinkPad

They released a new keyboard with TouchID and no TouchBar. IMO, that means the TB is dead. Otherwise, it's a niche item that no one will ever make full use of.

I wouldn't take that as a clear sign. They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too.

The touch bar is handled by the T1/T2/M1 chips in the laptops. It could be that just cramming a T2+OLED into a keyboard may have made it way too expensive for a keyboard. Plus does Bluetooth even have enough bandwidth to handle sending screen data that size reliably?

It is a niche item and it does suck but for some reason they keep tacking it on...

> They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too.

That's because changing the chassis is too expensive, but when they redesign it, you'll see it most likely without a touchbar.

They already had a touch bar free 13" MBP in that chassis. In fact they put in extra effort to add the touch bar to the 2 port 13" MBP.

You made 2 great points. There's also a rumor Apple had to do things to hide the M1 from Intel. Could the added TB been a part of that? Hard to know.

I'm not a TB hater (more indifference), and I still think it's going away :)

Ah you're right, I forgot about the 13" without touch bar.

You hate the Touch Bar so much that if Apple's next round of laptops includes one you'll stop using macOS and start using Linux (or Windows) on your laptop instead?

Right now I have an Air. Besides price, the main reason for getting an Air was not having the touch bar. That's non negotiable for me.

I want to both beef up the memory/processing power of my laptop and switch to Linux (which comes with built-in performance bonus of native Docker). So I am headed to ThinkPad anyway, but there's a chance Apple could keep me locked in if they make a nicely-powered proper dev machine with no damn touch bar.

Migrating to Big Sur has been a pain in the ass even though I am still on an Intel model. Tons of Python language versions and packages are a total PITA to get built on Big Sur.

To be fair this seems to be a pretty Python-specific issue, but the inability to do much about it really has dug the feeling into me that I don't own/control my machine, Apple does.

Sadly not that much, but I for one really dislike their decision on keeping it. It adds no value at all to my workflow; quite the contrary - It distracts and disrupts me a lot. Would love to get rid of it; but I learned to ignore it. There are apps that can completely disable it (Nocturnal).

Personally don't care for the touchbar, but it is fun sometimes as I have an external keyboard.

The fact the OS runs a dozen network services without being able to deactivate them is (the final straw) the pushed me back into the Linux camp.

The image here

https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/21/apple-ransomware-leak-new-mac...

looks like it has physical keys.

I think that's the right side of the laptop, so from the bottom up, it is shift, return, \, delete, and the connectors for the fingerprint sensor.

hallelujah

> I'd immediately buy an M1 MBP with MagSafe and actual ports

Looks like you won't have too long to wait:

Apple ransomware leak corroborates 2021 MacBook Pro ports: HDMI, MagSafe, SD card slot https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/21/apple-ransomware-leak-new-mac...

The lack of ports is what drove me to buy a Mini.

Not exactly sure if I'll end up buying a MBP later though. I basically only use my Mac for recording audio, and once you get your mic set up , your not too portable anyway

I hope they come with support for more than one external screen.